


ready (or not)

by caelzorah



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Multi, post 4x01, sexually fluid!Korra with zero qualms about it, ten percent character dynamics ninety percent philosophical wank, who knows what the avatar actually is? not korra, yoda!Toph
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 18:05:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2438036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelzorah/pseuds/caelzorah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She dreams about masks, dark spirits and poison and wakes in a cold sweat, wondering when exactly she turned into Zaheer, trying to force the Avatar state out of a body that did not want to comply.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all these years

**Author's Note:**

> Written post 4x01. I'm gonna go let 4x02 crush all my headcanons now.

Korra is three years old the first time she bends. Snowball fights are a staple of Southern life, and when she lets loose one particular shot at the young boy from three huts over that likes to pull faces at her during tribe meetings she turns it to water in the air. For a moment it feels relieving - like the first inhale after holding her breath, like her lungs have never been fully inflated. But then the moment passes, and no matter how much ice she crushes or how much water she turns to snow, it never feels like _enough_.

Four months later she dreams of a young girl in a green bandana, barefoot and blind. She is stubborn, hard as metal and rough around the edges. Korra does not remember the direction she is given (this is a lesson that was never meant for her). Still she wakes with "yes, Sifu," falling quickly from her lips, though the words are not her own. In the dark of the morning, wide awake, she focuses on nothing but the world around her - vibrations in ice and earth. For the rest of the day she stomps on every rock she sees.

That evening, for the first time, she moves stone. She wonders how she ever went without it.

 

\--

 

She is barely four when the White Lotus come to lock her away. Her parents were fine to keep it secret until she dreamed about a man with a dragon, and a city being overtaken by lava, ash and smoke - before she started setting her own clothes on fire just to prove she could. Katara smiles wisely at her in the middle of a training session (Korra glimpses, for a moment, smooth cheeks and dark hair somewhere beneath her wizened skin - a face from another time) and gently tells her parents that Korra takes too quickly to new ideas, and that if she remains unchecked she will become a danger. She can bend, and she is _good_ \- but she could be great. So they put her in a compound with a bunch of people who _know whats best for her_ and no one her age, and when she is five they give her a polar bear dog to cover the ache ("to teach you about responsibility," her mother says with a soft smile when she visits, "companionship, value of life.").

Korra is young, and reckless, and all too aware of the strength an Avatar possesses. And even when they take her away, even when they train her, even when her tutors try to tell her about responsibility, about legacy, about life, Korra stays that way. Stubborn, brash, headstrong.

When she's seven she dreams about Kyoshi, about Aang, about accountability. Trials and public faces. Crowds that speak over one another and call for action. History, and how it always favours the victor. 'Never forget,' they tell her in dreams, 'you are more than just yourself.'

But she knows: she is the Avatar. And it is all she wants to be.

 

\--

 

In her dreams, Korra lives in warm places. She swims in lakes and jumps off of mountains, riding wind like waves until she decides to land. She is young and old all at once, surrounded by faces she knows and will never know, will never see in person. She falls in and out of love every night, and wakes again lonely. In her sleep, she travels the world, crushes uprisings, saves lives and is hailed a hero - in her dreams she has friends.

Her favourites are of Aang - the light way he viewed the world, the company he kept along the years. She watches his face age overnight - full cheeks turning to hard lines, youth turning to wisdom. As a child, he is the best friend she never had. As an adult, he is her mentor, her idol, the legacy she has to live up to.

The first time she meets Tenzin (hard lines and wisdom, just like her dreams, just like his father), Korra cries. She never admits it to anyone.

 

\--

 

Korra begs to leave the compound when she is twelve ("Aang did it! So can I!"), lured north. She wants to see the world, to be a part of it. She wants to save people and crush bad guys beneath her boots. Mostly, she wants to see the city her predecessor left behind and corner her airbending tutor within it, take a few lessons and go. There is a whole world out there that needs the Avatar, and she is desperate to respond ("No," they say, "you're not ready," but she doesn't know how she's supposed to prepare for a world that she's never been a part of).

When Korra is thirteen, she dreams about Koh.

He taunts her - or whoever she was before she was her - showing faces that do not belong to him, jarring her other selves with his saccharine words and grotesque body. He steals a face she knew in another life, someone she loved, and threatens another, and Aang keeps calm in the midst of malevolence but Korra thrashes in her bed until she wakes. She sets her master's robes on fire that day.

For weeks, she revisits it. Avatar Kurok and his negligence, his love lost, his despair. Her dreams have always been so full of light, and life, and it is the first time that sleep has haunted her. She is sure it is a lesson, but she doesn't know the moral.

Her keepers order tea to help her sleep. A young girl brings it to the compound one day, fifteen and bright-eyed, long, dark hair with a slight curl. She smiles at Korra across the yard - idle, probably, and needlessly kind - and leaves. Korra never sees her again.

It is the first time she falls in love (in this lifetime). The tea helps for a time, but eventually she dreams of Koh again, only now it is the girl's face he shows - something new, something of Korra's. It is the first time she experiences fear.

 

\--

 

When she is fifteen, Aang shows her a memory of a swamp, and a laughing ghost dancing through the trees. She doesn't think about it again for a long time.

 

\--

 

At seventeen, Korra learns that the world she lives in is not the world she knows. There is more than the Southern Water Tribe, more than a compound and it's bending masters, more than the memories she has that are not her own. Things have changed.

Republic City is not kind to Avatar Korra. It gives her friends: Bolin, and Mako, and Asami - the people she doesn't know how to live with, and then doesn't know how to live without. It give her family, on top of her own: Tenzin, and Pema, their children, Lin - the people she doesn't know how to handle who handle her. It gives her love and makes her question the worth of it. It grants her fame. And then it strips it all away.

She shows up in headlines, her photo in newspapers. Someone hands her a chart of approval ratings and Tenzin hides full pages of exposés and slander in her name between the books on his office shelves. She is cornered by reporters and angry citizens alike who call profanities, wish she would do less, curse her for not doing enough. And this is only one city - there are worse things outside of it.

There are responsibilities she has that she has never considered. There are consequences to her actions that she has never expected. And there is not a single villain that sets themselves against her in the year following whose ideas and intentions do not have merit; there is not one who is innately evil. Korra has always known that she was born to be a hero, but she is at a loss of how to do so in a world that is as likely to demonise her as it is to accept her. She hesitates. She suffers.

Amon locks her bending away, and for a moment she forgets how to breathe. Ironically, breathing is the thing that saves her.

Unalaq teaches her to calm spirits, and then rips the most important one right out of her. She gets Raava back, but loses her histories.

Zaheer poisons her with logic and liquid metal, leaves her lost and too weak to move. He takes two things from her - only one returns.

After all is said and done, and the strength is gone from her arms - after she is wheelchair bound, and alone in her head for the first time in eighteen years - she begins to dream of villains and their _valid concerns_. A group of street thugs with the elements at their fingertips and a thousand rules to break; the red and white mask facing them, saying enough is enough. A piece of history forgotten, turning hostile to a changing world, and a chieftain who only wanted peace between the two. A queen who segregated and bullied money out of her own people, and the scholar who stole the breath from her lungs and watched her choke to death. And all of them looking at her, asking how she let things get this far, telling her she's not needed.

When she is eighteen her dreams are replaced by nightmares.

 

\--

 

She is chair bound - physically limited, spiritually drained. She can't move, she can't think, she can't bend. Darkness rings her eyes, and her mother worries over her as if she is a child again, as if she is whoever she was when she was three (and not the Avatar). Mako offers his shoulder, like it makes a difference. Bolin jokes, but it doesn't reach his eyes. Asami smiles at her in the mornings, and the afternoons, and before they part ways each night, trying and succeeding at supportive, but she looks more frazzled every day. There is a chorus of "you'll get better"s just waiting for the asking, but she doesn't want them. How can she be an Avatar without strength, without bending, without purpose?

Tenzin replaces her with a nation as a "get well soon" present. As if that's not the problem.

She flees South under grounds of homesickness. Her mother thinks that maybe being away from Republic City and it's media obsession, being home and alone and amidst the familiar, will help her. She doesn't say what they all know: Katara is there, the arguably best healer in the world. Asami offers to go with her, and Korra struggles to smile at the suggestion before she rejects it. She doesn't want anyone to see her the way she is: weak, incapable, useless.

She doesn't say what they all know: she's not getting better (she doesn't want to).

 

\--

 

Korra spends her nineteenth birthday the same way she has the entire six months preceding it - reading through most of the day, avoiding Katara's ever-present frown, and steering her wheelchair out of the village to stargaze after dinner. There is a letter on her bed back in her parents' house and she knows that it is from Tenzin - wishing her well, and asking for updates, and describing the world up north. It's been sitting there for four days. She doesn't have the heart to open it.

Two letters ago Mako tacked on a note asking after her, wanting to know how she was. She had ignored the question entirely in her short, disinterested reply, but she knows that Katara has been mailing them updates of her own and they are rarely any good. She doesn't have to read them to know what they say: "six months and she still isn't walking," and "managed to get her out of her chair the other day, but she could only support herself for four seconds before her knees buckled beneath her" and "barely managed to bend a breeze". She doesn't need to read them because she has lived them. She has lived through shaky limbs and the torturous attempt at crutches that didn't work out, every afternoon healing session and the excruciating physical therapy that accompanies them. She spends two hours a days clutching at bars and trying in vain to stay on her feet, struggling with light weights and forcing her limbs to cooperate when the months have left them thin and weak. Katara calls it progress, but frowns when Korra's back is turned anyway.

The last letter that arrived came direct from Asami, suggesting a visit to the South for Korra's birthday and heavily implying that "no" would not be an acceptable answer. Korra gave it anyway (felt guilty for as long as it took to seal it and send it away, and tried not to think about it again). She spent thirteen years of her life alone in a compound, nothing but mentors, guards, and a polar bear dog for company (and the memories of everyone she was before she was herself) - six months with her family is not a trial. There is no reason her friends should put their lives on hold to watch her spin around in her wheelchair and stare at the stars.

On this night, she starts when she hears the sound of crunching snow. By the most part, when she escapes into the cold beneath the Southern Lights her watchers and her worriers leave her alone. Not this time.

'My mother's looking for you,' Kya says gently when she's close enough for quiet tones. Korra doesn't turn to her, but she can feel the older woman's presence beside her - calm, cool, just like Katara. In moments like this the resemblance is uncanny. 'She would have come out to speak to you on her own, but then she is a little past the age of late-night roaming.' A pause. 'Don't tell her I told you that.'

Once, Korra might have laughed at the joke. It feels like her humour deserted her along with every other thing that made her important - her abilities, her links to the past, her vitality. She wonders, often, if it wouldn't have been easier to succumb to the poison.

'Hey now,' Kya calls when too long passes without a response. 'It's your birthday. You left dinner early. Your parents wanted to celebrate with you. Nineteen's not a small number.'

'I was a thousand years old, once, not too long ago,' Korra replies. 'What's nineteen years to that?'

She barely feels the hand that lands on her shoulder, but Kya steps in front of her with this harsh look on her face that reminds Korra of a dream she had when she was younger, a memory that never belonged to her. Kya looks like her mother, and Korra misses her past.

'It's a whole year alone, for someone who never really has been. It's an _achievement_ ,' Kya tells her, a glint of fire in her eyes. 'And if you think for a second that you are anything less just because you lost a couple of voices from your head, Korra, you are sorely mistaken.'

Korra wants to ask "what am I without their experience?", wants to point out that she is not Wan, and she is not ready to forge new paths and make decisions on her own. She was all too willing to accept a history, a legacy, and play it out, but she is not prepared to be the first of anything, to be alone, to be the only one. She doesn't say any of these things; she does not think Kya will understand.

'I keep wondering if maybe the reason that I lost them, though,' she says instead, 'is that maybe - maybe they were all right. We don't need the old Avatars and their old ideas. Maybe we just don't need an Avatar at all.'

Kya purses her lips and retracts her supportive hand on Korra's shoulder only in order to hit her there.

'I don't believe that for a second,' the woman says dryly. 'I'm pretty sure the fact that anyone had to tell you that at all is proof enough. Even assuming those three voices did speak for the vast majority - and they didn't - people rarely know what they want, let alone what they _need_. When I was little and I didn't understand what the Avatar was, I used to ask my dad why he left us behind all the time - trips all over the world to help people and fix problems. We were in a time of peace, he'd already saved the world, and I didn't understand why he couldn't just stay home. I didn't understand how anyone could need him more than me.'

Korra thinks of the few memories Aang gave her of his older years, of his children. How much he loved them. She never saw the times he left them behind. She stares at Kya and waits - for a revelation or disappointment, she's not sure.

'He sat me down one day and explained that - an Avatar exists to "maintain balance in the world, and create it if there is absence". And I didn't understand then - and I still don't,' Kya says. 'I travelled the world for years and years, just like him, and I still don't. He always had this sense of purpose about him that I could never quite grasp. "As long as there is a need for the Avatar, I will fulfil that need," he told me. "And there will always be one. There will never be perfect balance. It is not within human nature." I didn't believe _that_ until I was older. By then he was gone.'

'I don't know what that means,' Korra mumbles, watery-eyed, and Kya grips her shoulders and stares at her, all gentle eyes and compassion. 'Balance? I'm not Aang. I don't know what that means.'

'You don't have to. Just trust it,' Kya says. 'And if you can't, then take pains to remember: there are still people who need the Avatar. Your parents, your friends. They need _you_.'

Kya sits with her until she is okay with returning to her parents' home and the people within, and then pushes her back to town. Korra spends hours supplying half-hearted conversation and wondering what "balance" really is. When her mother helps her to bed she notes the way practiced fingers fold the blankets over her, the way they smooth out any creases. Senna smiles at her, loving and sad, and Korra think of all the years she didn't spend at home. Kya thinks her parents need the Avatar, but for a moment Korra wonders if they wouldn't have been happier with another child - someone more... someone _more_.

Two weeks later she makes it four whole steps unassisted in her physical therapy before her knees give out. It's the first time in six months she sees Katara smile.

 

\--

 

There are eight more months of sweating out her bad thoughts, re-learning to walk, and feeling like a useless child. At the end of them she is a professional at wheelchair tricks, but she can also finally stand on her own, take long walks, swim for a straight twenty minutes without wanting to drown. Definition returns to neglected limbs, strength to her steps. Long hikes leave her breathless and unpleasantly weak in the knees, but she _can_ hike.

She can't bend.

She spends hours every day down by the water, away from worried gazes, pushing and pulling at the tide like a three year old who has only just manifested the ability - only, a three year old would see more success.

It is a struggle to feel currents, to melt ice. The first element she ever moved denies her. She stomps at the ground, pushes through the earthbending forms with every bit of strength left in her body and barely manages to shake pebbles. When she's too tired to stay on her feet she sits alone in the cold, snapping her fingers, desperate for a fire and barely even finding a spark. On her bed before she goes to sleep she breathes as deeply as she can, but her lungs still feel starved of air. She feels like she is three years old again, living on half breaths.

Katara tells her that she is physically fine, that there is no reason she shouldn't be able to bend. The problem is spiritual and only Korra can fix it. But then spirituality has never been Korra's strong suit.

On one particular day, failing at the things that she has always been best at and driven by desperation ("what is an Avatar without bending?"), Korra pushes too hard. She is tired of being ignored by the tide, of being cold, of suffocating. Her footsteps barely make a sound where once she caused earthquakes. She reaches for the water and for a moment - for one aching, glorious moment - she can feel it pulling at her again, she feels connected. She chases it, grasps at it, claws after it as it slips between desperate fingers, but it is gone as soon as it comes.

Something moves within her - something brash, and angry, and old, and animal - and she can feel her eyes flash blue, and back again. She thrashes until the ground shakes, ice breaks, and the wind lashes at her face, but it's not enough. She is separate parts, she is not connected, she is cold. Her body calls for fire until it lights the air around her, but she is broken and out of control, and it burns her skin, sets her hair alight, turns her sleeves to ash. The pain shocks her into clarity, and the light leaves her eyes at the same time as the strength leaves her legs, sending her crashing into the snow.

Her father finds her curled on the ice, tears in her eyes and no sound in her throat, and he takes her into his arms and carries her home. Katara heals her blistering skin and pats her gently on the arm, mutters that everything will be alright. Her mother tucks her into bed that night with warm eyes and warm hands, like every one before. Not one of them tries to combat unresponsiveness with brute force. She dreams about masks, dark spirits and poison and wakes in a cold sweat, wondering when exactly she turned into Zaheer, trying to force the Avatar state out of a body that did not want to comply.

In the lull before dawn, down by the water, she takes her father's spear to her singed hair and watches the wind take every strand away from her.

 

\--

 

More letters come. Tenzin is glad she is doing well (they tell him she's walking now, but no one mentions her bending). The airbenders are thriving. Jinora's hair has grown back. Asami is designing trains. Bolin is in the longest committed relationship he's ever had. Mako is working, and working hard, and enjoying himself. The president built a statue of her in a park that shares her name, commemorating her like he'd never sneered in her direction or dismissed her claims. All the usual - and then, something new.

There are things that they haven't told her.

Tenzin is filtering requests for aid, and the airbenders have more pleas than they can handle. Asami is fixing the city's spirit problem, and Mako is cleaning the streets, and Bolin has joined a peacekeeping force that is sweeping the nation. Revolution has done what revolution does best - left people dead and tired in it's wake - and a woman who once saved Korra's father's life stands tall in the aftermath and aims to unite a fractured continent. They all save the world while Korra sits down south, testing her legs and snapping her fingers for want of a spark.

Korra thinks of being thirteen, dreaming of Kurok and Koh, wonders what the consequences will be of sitting this one out.

When she's been home for two years she gets a letter from Opal. It isn't long: "this is not unity", scrawled on a scrap of dirty paper and sent from some backwater town in the Earth Kingdom, her signature at the bottom and nothing else. It doesn't detail pleasantries and quiet hope. It doesn't come with sympathy. Korra doesn't understand it - which is why it matters.

She spends six months focusing on throwing rocks, coaxing the feeling back into her limbs. Earthbending was always the thing she was best at - she's stubborn, and that's why she gets it back. She's not as good as she used to be but she can look after herself. Her father believes her when she says she's going back to the city, but Katara meets her at the docks on the night she leaves. She has a leather flask dangling from one hand and a short spear in the other - a single hander, stocky and well-made, maybe a metre in length and easier to tote around than the military standard, not unlike the one of her father's that Korra took to her hair.

'Where are you really going?' the old bender asks her, and Korra is prepared to lie until she adds, 'You're leaving Naga behind, so I know it's nowhere friendly.'

'I can't help anyone here.'

'Then go to the city. Go to my son. Let him help you.'

'I don't know what I need him to help me to do,' Korra tells her, letting the frustration bleed through. 'My whole life, I have been chaperoned. I've seen my compound, down here. I've seen Republic City. I've seen tiny problems in tiny places, but everything else I know is from memories that are not my own, from times that are long past. Ba Sing Se was a culture shock to me. How am I supposed to help the world if I don't know what it needs?'

Katara gets this unreadable expression on her wizened face - the one Korra has come to associate with memories of a time long gone, with another Avatar. Then she softens.

'My husband saw the world when he was young. We lived in a time when our problems were very clearly defined, where he would have benefitted from an insular environment and trainers on-hand. He had to learn everything on the go,' Katara tells her. 'When he organised your training with the White Lotus he had your best interests in mind.'

'He always did.'

'Yes,' Katara agrees with an old, tinkling laugh. 'But I also knew my husband well, and for all his good intentions he still made mistakes. A lot of those were with his children. Some of them were with you.'

She holds the items in her hands out for Korra to take. Korra frowns and reaches first for the flask.

'Water from the spirit oasis. I didn't have a whole lot of it left, but I don't foresee myself needing it anytime soon. Save it for your worst moments,' Katara explains. Then she pushes the spear into Korra's hands. 'You may be able to throw rocks around, but you're still not yourself. This belonged to my brother. Keep safe. Go home when you've found what you're looking for.'

Katara hugs her goodbye, and promises to hold all her letters, and not to tell anyone where she's going (not that Katara knows, because Korra doesn't either). Long after the old woman has disappeared into the snow and the dying light and Korra has boarded a ship heading due north, Korra wonders why her old master said to 'go' instead of 'come' home.

 

\--

 

The ship takes her somewhere in the Fire Nation - she doesn't ask for names, and she never gives one of her own. She works her way from village to village, skips through islands like stepping stones. No one recognises her. In a nation that has never seen her in anything other than old pictures, it is easy to become someone else.

She picks up odd jobs to keep coin in her pocket, and stops for a few days everywhere she goes to observe. She finds her way into temples and eavesdrops on history lectures, sneaks into classrooms and dojos and watches from the shadows in one particular school as an old man teaches a small group of bright-eyed children how to call fire to their fingertips. She takes part in festivals where young men teach her their traditional dances, and girls treat her to new food, and clothes, and small talk. At one point, she even stands on top of a dormant volcano and looks down over the mottled ash covering a town that she once lived in (in another life, another body, another time).

Sometimes she spends days - weeks, even - alone, traipsing through woods and mountains, immersing herself in nature and solitude until she is called back to civilisation for short words, or smiles, or food. She sees villages that bustle with life, every different colour of skin lured by good trade and culture. She sees towns divided by class, by money, by race. She sees residents being called tourists, hears racial slurs that should have died out years ago. She runs out of money after two months, can't get any work, and steals from a fire nation man decked in chains and fine silks who knocks over a small tribal boy on the street, lifts his nose and calls him names. In her head, she calls him horrid, calls him disgusting, calls him a bigot. When she cuts the purse from his belt she even tells herself he deserves it.

Bars become her favourite place to lurk; alcohol and the cacophony of sound bring out the best and the worst in their patrons. When there is noise people are more prone to being loud, and she hears all about new ideas and opportunities and problems most freely when she has a drink in her hand. There is always someone looking to give work away, always someone asking for help, always another rumour, another lead to follow.

In some towns, she will spend her nights tracking down bandits and common thugs - sometimes to tip off the police, sometimes just to test herself. Mostly, she spends her days helping farmers relocate sewage pipes and patch broken ceilings, or till fields for families with sick sons who have fallen behind in their work. Sometimes a stranger will make the base assumption about tribes' women and ask about waterbending, about healing - she closes a few cuts and soothes a few burns and gets a little better at it every time.

One man hires her to carry his tools around until he can scout a new assistant; he spends a week teaching her how to rewire lights and power points, fix broken taps and properly paint walls. On one day, she watches him tear apart the plumbing beneath someone's kitchen sink and replace every single part of it.

'It was hardly even leaking,' she says. 'Couldn't you have just tightened the joints and re-sealed it?'

He laughs kindly - this tinkling, old chuckle that resounds experience - and shakes his head.

'I could - and it would do the job, for a while,' he agrees. 'But an immediate fix doesn't guarantee longevity. Eventually the pipe would rust, or burst, or the seal would break. It would leak again - possibly worse than before. Why just fix something when you can replace it with something better?'

When he finds a replacement he tells her that she can stay instead - that she's smart, and kind, and good company, and he enjoys working with her enough to keep her. She refuses and he shakes her hand warmly and says she can come back any time - that there will always be a job if she wants it. Three miles down the highway after leaving town, she stops. Some part of her wants to spin on the spot - run back, take a job in the middle of nowhere doing handy work for nice people (wants to be no one important). But something else in her, or something far away - she doesn't know - calls her eastward. She keeps walking.

Every once in a while, someone will talk about the Avatar, will look at her with some vague glint of recognition, and Korra will disappear overnight, just another shadow in the dark.

She finds her way to Ember Island and spends her nights sleeping on the beach under the stars, struggling to remember a different time with young versions of faces she has only ever seen aged and greying (she doesn't succeed). In another life she came here with friends. Now, she is surrounded by people and so completely alone.

A young man and his friends invite her to a bonfire, and she joins them. For a little while she forgets herself - laughs, and jokes, and pretends they're friends. There is a girl who reminds her too keenly of a young mechanic with perfect hair and red lipstick, and Korra sidles away from her in the firelight until a cute boy with his hair in a wolf tail starts a conversation and steals her attention away. He says his name is Kesuk, and his mother moved down from the Northern Water Tribe before he was born. His father owns the local inn, and at nineteen he's caught somewhere between taking up the family business and joining the military. Korra tells him that there is nothing glorious about war and duty and kisses him for a while down by the water, lit up by the distant flames and the foreign human contact.

In the morning she hops the first boat back east.

 

\--

 

It is far, far easier to find work in the Earth Kingdom, but harder to come by coin. Many people need help, but few are in any position to pay her for it. Her pockets run empty very quickly.

She trades her water tribe coat to a young woman running fishing boats on the coast for a new bag and a week's worth of rations. She sells the things she doesn't need and buys some summer clothes to deal with the deserts and the long plateaus that are characteristic of the ground she plans to cover. It's the Earth Kingdom, so there's a lot of it.

The first few weeks, roaming towns by the coast, are the easiest ones. These are places of trade and moderate traffic, less affected in the wake of revolution. But the further inland she goes, the more Korra learns: without a monarch the nation fell apart and in the time since one woman has been putting it back together - piece by reluctant, screaming piece. At first, what Kuvira is doing sounds like a favour. But the more that she hears, the more Korra suspects this particular brand of "peacekeeping" to be nothing of the sort. The "Great Uniter" sounds nothing like the almost kind woman who saved her father nearly three years ago.

Something calls her towards the horizon, and she zig-zags after it, stopping at every town she can along the way. Now, she spends her days dusty, tired, burning beneath the sun, helping small towns fix wrecked buildings and bringing supplies in through dangerous routes unhindered. Bandits are a huge problem on this side of the world, and she spends more time than she is comfortable with locking them into concrete boots, or smacking them upside the head with her spear and trying in vain to take their bending away - yet another ability she is proven to have lost. The ones who are awake during each attempt stare at her with fear and no small amount of confusion - wondering why she touches their foreheads at all, let alone why she's frustrated when nothing happens. She memorises every face before she tips off the nearest police force, just in case she ever gets it _back_.

Once, years ago, she faced a man who told her people could not be trusted with bending. He wasn't right. He wasn't wrong, either.

 

\--

 

She falls in love - more than once. She kisses girls and boys in bars and dark corners, and never goes further than that. There's always something familiar about them:

(Bolin's laugh, Asami's smile, Mako's passion).

She leaves them all behind.

 

\--

 

Her pockets run empty in the middle of nowhere, and when she is twenty-one she wraps her hands in bandages to cover the skin of her knuckles and keep her fists firm and starts fighting for money. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thinks of a blind girl and a young boy, and a dirt-floor arena in Gaoling.

Some nights she bends earth for it, throwing rocks at her opponents and testing her limits, bruising skin and breaking bones. She loses more often than not - wishes she was at full strength even while she relishes the fact that she isn't. She doesn't need the attention that being _good_ would bring her; someone might mistake her for a ghost. Other nights, she goes hand to hand - fighting with fists and feet, and sometimes her spear. First blood wins. She does better at these - splitting lips and knocking out men twice her size - and she'll rack up a few wins and leave town before they earn her too much notice.

It works, for a while - until it doesn't. It's a dirty back-alley gambling joint in a dirty back-alley town. She loses to a girl who she should have beaten, could have three years ago - before Zaheer took her strength, her confidence, her spirit, and chained them away in the dark. The club owner pays her and then pays her out. He likens her to a girl who used to smile in photos on newspapers and mess up the world.

'Whatever happened to her, anyway?' he asks.

Korra takes her black eye and the bad taste in her mouth and leaves, because that's what she does best.

'I wouldn't know.'


	2. calling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So far as hunting goes, Toph is probably the most enjoyable partner she's ever had.

She finds her way to the swamp. That nagging feeling that she can't quite pinpoint the beginning of - the one that has pervaded every waking hour and called to her in her sleep - finally comes to a halt. She stops at the tree line, abandons her bag and the few things left in it, and straps Sokka's old spear to her back. Katara's flask rests at her hip, untouched (Korra has a hundred cuts and bruises, but there hasn't been a single hurt worthy of spirit water yet). Then she goes.

She is swallowed by damp trees and dirty water, shadows and the thick scent of nature, of spirits and dead things. When night truly falls - hardly a star visible through the canopy - she unwinds a bandage from her hand, wraps it around a stick, then clicks her fingers beneath it until they finally spark and turn to flame. The makeshift torch casts shadows across hulking trunks and gnarled branches, lights up a hundred eyes at the edge of her field of vision. She sees a flash of pearly white in her peripheral - barely for a moment - and thinks of youth, of Aang, of dreaming, and dismisses it as wishful thinking. She has spent a long time looking for memories that are not her own, and now she knows they are gone. Somewhere in the distance she hears a little girl laughing - hollow, old - and wonders why a place that tried so hard to hail her should seem so uninviting. She walks further in.

No stars, no compass, no heading. She wanders. And something out there is watching. Awareness prickles at the back of her neck and ripples down her spine. She loses sense of time. It's always dark, always warm, always damp. It might be day; it might be night again. She walks until she can't anymore, finds something worth eating, climbs to find solace in the branches of the trees and sleeps.

When she's rested enough, she does it again.

 

\--

 

It is never pleasant waking. The first time, it's to the sound of distant laughter. The second is to vague spectral figures flitting through the trees. The third, a familiar voice calls her "Avatar," as if to rouse her and she kicks at the air until it goes away. The fourth, she glimpses a dark body moving steadily towards her through the shadows; it evaporates before she fully opens her eyes.

But the fifth - the fifth is the worst.

She wakes to a body looming over her, eyes gazing unflinching into her own - a glowing, bright blue. She jerks into motion, swiping at the air and _connecting_ , sending it - it, _it_ , and it _can't_ be what it seems - reeling away. Korra shoots to her feet, body tensing to fight. The thing recovers and turns back to face her, and Korra's jaw would drop if she weren't so unnerved by staring at a carbon copy of it. It is surreal, ridiculous, horrifying - because, surrounded by hulking trees, dirty water and dark spaces, Korra stares at herself.

The other body doesn't speak, but it takes a stance she knows too well: standoffish, hostile - every threat she's ever known given form in body language. And even while she notes the similarities between them, she counts the differences - this version of her has hair to her shoulders and an outfit that Korra threw out two years ago. This body has smooth skin where Korra has scars. Most importantly, though - and she knows because the water bubbles around it's feet and the bare breeze that Korra has felt ever since walking into the swamp suddenly picks up to lash at her skin - this body can bend.

Korra has been in the Avatar state before, but she has never seen it. The blue glow eclipses her irises, washes out the dark tan of her skin, turns her ethereal - alien. Beneath the familiar light, it's brow furrows - and she sees her own face turn from calm to determined, from frustrated to furious. The other version of her lurches forward, and for the first time in her life Korra can see the way the muscles in her arms ripple through the movement. Strong hands reach out to circle her wrist, lock around them roughly and yank her forward. Everything about it is fascinating. Everything about it is frightening.

It is everything she was three years ago, chasing Zaheer through canyons and moving mountains with the hope of crushing him beneath them: raging, frantic, frightened. It is physical strength, fortitude, purpose; everything that was taken from her by poison, by nightmares and bed rest. It is not Korra, no matter how much it looks like her.

It's the Avatar, and it grips her almost tight enough to break her bones.

Korra could fight. She wants to, somewhere inside - in some part of her that hasn't spoken up at all in three years. But the Avatar exhales steam into her face, another hint of bending that Korra can't recall, and the hands around her wrists begins to scald. She can almost feel her skin blistering - the same way it did when she lost control in the south and set herself alight. The most fight that she has within her is to knee at the blue-clad stomach and pull her burning arms away, to stumble back and into the trees. A fireball chases after her, barely grazing her shoulder and the back of her neck.

She would like to think this blue eyed figure is just a ghost of her former self, but there is nothing incorporeal about the damned thing (and besides: that title belongs to her). She bolts into the swamp, crashing through dense foliage and shallow water, hopping roots and scaling trunks. There is no destination other than "away from _that_ " and she has never run so fast in her life.

But the Avatar has her limbs, her strength, her stride, and every ability she has forgotten how to use; it follows her wherever she goes.

 

\--

 

She tries to hide. It finds her every time.

 

\--

 

Every time she slows down she sees blue light running beside her. Every time she stops it is only to whirl around for a new direction, dodge another boulder, another ball of fire, another flurry of air. She never saw the Avatar as a hostile thing until Zaheer tried to force it out of her, until it curled up inside her and snarled to be saved at any cost (but maybe that was just Korra?). She sees it now as it pursues her through the swamp, burning branches and occasionally felling trees.

Swamp water freezes around her ankle mid-step and she learns, wherever possible, to stick to tree roots and stone. She narrowly avoids a flurry of jagged, rocky disks with a movement she hasn't used in years, and for a moment she thinks of a simpler time, of practicing pro-bending forms with Bolin in the training room at the arena. She ducks around a tree as lightning strikes past her and remembers Mako quietly smiling while he showed her the forms for it. The Avatar grabs her once or twice, throws fists and hard kicks, and before she separates and turns tail to run Korra thinks of being eighteen and sparring with Asami, hitting too hard and going too far, and watching the mechanic shake her head and laugh off every apology.

It is seconds, minutes, hours, days, of her pulse rushing in her ears and her feet pounding on the ground, of staving off burns and aches. It is not long enough to cover whatever distance there is and leave the swamp, to find help. It is too long to be alone, just her and the Avatar.

Exhaustion sets in. She slows down.

When she starts to see the occasional stumble in her steps, something changes: she finds a clearing. She pauses when she breaks from the tree line, glances over mud and mossy stone - some part of a building long gone now, stone floors and ruined pillars with no ceiling atop them, faint starlight shining through the breaks in the canopy. It is the first time she's seen the sky in - she doesn't know how long. Korra is too tired, too busy trying to decide which way to run to remember why it is that she is running at all.

The Avatar collides with her, ramming her with a hard body, all the force of earth and air behind it. Korra's feet leave the ground entirely, the impact sending her flying ten metres over the mud and into the ruins. Gravity crashes her face-down onto cool stone and the momentum skids her across an old layer of moss and grime. She jerks onto her back and sits up, grasps for the spear at her back, and turns back towards the treeline, towards blue eyes and stiff shoulders, rage and purpose. But even as the Avatar stalks towards her, triumphant - even as she pushes up onto tired feet - she knows that something has changed. Her other self - angry, silent and young - calls fire to it's fingertips and rushes towards the ruins, and Korra _swears_ that the air between them sparks.

'Oh, no you don't,' she hears - a voice that seems ridiculously young, absurdly familiar, and altogether not quite _there_. And before her eyes, her horror-show mirror image crashes into empty air - and with a noise like thunder, the invisible barrier glints like steel and sends it reeling back. Korra scrambles to her feet and whirls, spear in one hand, looking for the owner of the new voice and coming up short. There is no one there. When she looks again, the long-haired Korra is pacing back and forth along the line of a wall that neither can see, body tense, almost animal. It doesn't try to come any closer.

The first sound after that (the first in hours other than rushed footsteps, crashes and bangs, leaves and the crackle of flames, heartbeat pounding in her head and her own strangled breathing) is that of something rolling across stone. She looks down as a stick - only, not a stick, because it is the torch she fashioned on day one and extinguished every time she settled to sleep, the one she abandoned miles behind her in the swamp - comes to a stop, nudging lightly into her boot. She doesn't know where it came from.

'Pick it up, brickhead. You're gonna want to see this.'

Another rushed glance around still doesn't reveal a third body in the clearing. It's just her and a version of her from three years ago, and the distance between them. But the voice - sourceless, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once - doesn't belong to either of them. She leans down and wraps cautious fingers around the torch. She doesn't have to light it this time - the charred cloth flares up at her touch. Something moves to the right of her between the broken pillars - a wisp of white, almost like a robe fluttering in the wind.

'Come. I've been waiting for you for a long time.'

Korra starts after the movement, steps towards it and then stops, looking back over her shoulder at the other version of her still caught near the tree line - blue eyes and a bad attitude. It has stopped pacing and now stands still as a statue, facing her out of the shadows. She can not make out the curve of it's brow over the distance, but she knows it is glaring at her. Korra doesn't know what it is that's preventing the thing's approach, doesn't know whose voice it is that beckons her forth, but in either case she would rather not press her luck. She turns her back on the figure by the trees and disappears into the ruins.

 

\--

 

It is only the occasional flurry of pearlescent light in her peripheral vision, but it leads her past the pillars, into a dilapidated courtyard with a handful of stone benches (mostly broken) and a fountain that has long since stopped flowing. She pauses at the fountain, and borrows some of the dirty water sitting stagnant in the stone pool to heal the burns around her wrists.

The place smells like earth, like compost and dead things, and the promise of new life that they provide. Her torch casts shadows across three dwellings. One of them is half sunken into the ground, only a half metre of the door frame clear of dirt and murky water. The second has long since bowed to the elements and to time, and she guesses that the roof collapsed when it's supports rotted away. The third is decrepit, but still standing; Korra sees something shift inside it, some vague sense of movement in the dark, and warily approaches with her torch held ahead of her. A ratty green cloth hangs over the door as some kind of marker - she reaches out for it, runs her fingers along the fabric, and for a moment she thinks it familiar. But something inside her says to ignore it for more important things, and she retracts her hand, faces forward, and ducks through the doorway.

The torch casts as much light as it does shadow, and every inch of the floor that it illuminates causes a pang of anxiety in Korra's stomach. There are signs of life: a small pack, empty now, and a few scattered pieces of clothing around it, three strange looking rocks that she would guess to belong to a meteor, an old tin that looks to hold tea leaves and a metal pot beside it. There is a mottled blanket that has succumbed to the damp, discoloured and fragile. She nears the back of the room and glimpses an old bedroll and a pair of boots. Familiar metal armour reflects the torchlight back at her, and Korra is not prepared for what she finds within it: bones. Suddenly, the green rag over the door makes all too much sense.

'Toph?'

There is as much horror in her eyes as there is in her tone, but she cannot look away. Her torch falls, casting the grinning skull back into shadow, but it takes a gasping breath and the lingering scent of decay - of the hut, or the swamp, or Toph, she doesn't know - to send her stumbling out of the room, eyes watering and a hint of bile threatening her throat.

That glimmer of pearlescent white rematerialises when she has collapsed onto one of the few intact benches in the courtyard and suppressed the desire to empty her stomach onto the stone floor. When Korra raises her head, she comes face to face with a figment of her dreams, Aang's memories - a young Toph Beifong.

'You're dead.'

'Well,' the girl says - the same one whose laugh lured her into the swamp, the same one who called her "Avatar" while she was sleeping and begged her to wake, the same one who disappeared years ago and died, apparently, alone in the place Aang first saw her face. 'I _was_ over eighty years old. It was bound to happen sometime.'

She smiles, young and and a touch sarcastic, but the fountain behind her is visible straight through her teeth and it gives Korra the strangest urge to vomit. She's not sure what it is about the situation she finds the most disturbing - the spirit masquerading as a twelve year old, or the transparency. As a child, she never thought she would spend so much time chasing ghosts.

Toph tells her to sleep. It's difficult; the _other_ Korra - the Avatar - is still prowling around the edge of the ruins, waiting for a chance to follow her in. Korra is afraid of waking to glowing eyes and a hand around her throat, and she lays on the bench and fidgets until the young ghost of the old bones all of ten metres away scoffs at her and says: 'I'm incorporeal, not useless. Trust me when I tell you: it's not getting in.'

 

\--

 

This time, when she comes back to consciousness, Toph is sitting cross-legged on the fountain edge, wispy and wavering with the breeze. Korra sits up and stares at her, cataloguing details. She is wearing the same thing she wore destroying people three times her size in earthbending matches and travelling across the nation with the Avatar.

'You don't look the same now as the time Aang saw you here,' Korra says idly. 'You wore dress robes and played with a flying boar.'

'Yes, well, _that_ was the swamp showing Aang what he needed to see,' Toph tells her dryly. Korra wonders if this is not the same thing. 'This is a personal statement. Besides, I've never even seen a flying boar.'

'I don't imagine you've _seen_ much of anything.'

Toph laughs so hard she would probably cry - if she weren't already dead.

 

\--

 

Korra ventures back into the hut to grab the abandoned kettle and the little tin beside it. There's no food in the clearing, but she bends enough water out of the fountain to filter and boil for tea. They don't talk so much while she brews it, but afterwards - when the kettle has cooled enough to drink from - Korra mentions the glowing eyes out at the treeline, prowling in the shadows.

'I would tell you to ignore it,' Toph tells her idly. 'But I'm pretty sure that's the reason it's here.'

'Do you know what it is?'

'Of course,' Toph says, but doesn't look. Korra wonders how spirits see, if death alleviates blindness. She wonders if it is rude to ask. 'So do you. I would guess you just don't want to admit it.' When Korra doesn't respond, Toph changes the subject. 'Could you, perhaps, tell me about my daughters?'

As if having a twelve year old ask after the state of their children isn't the most absurd thing Korra's ever experienced. But then, she's been chased through a swamp by an alternate version of herself and sheltered by a ghost, so it's probably not.

'How do you know I've met them?'

'I've been dead for five years or so, I know, but I know more about the world outside of here than you might think,' Toph replies. 'And people leave marks on one another. Little things that no one really sees. Spirit. I don't know how to explain it.'

'They were well, last I saw them,' Korra tells her, and cocks her head thoughtfully at the ghost's words. 'But it's been a long time.'

'Have they forgiven one another?' she asks, and Korra nods. She catches herself and goes to verbalise the affirmative, but Toph smiles sadly, and Korra knows that even if the spirit didn't see the motion she understood the feeling behind it. 'Have they forgiven me?'

There is a pause. Korra doesn't know the answer to that one.

'Why did you come here?' she asks instead. ' _Why did you die here?_ ' she thinks. Toph laughs - idle, low - and gestures to the ruins around them, to the swamp around that.

'I was looking for something,' the little ghost says. 'Same as you.'

 

\--

 

Toph accompanies her back into the swamp to find food. 'We can't go too far,' she says, 'I'm not so strong that far from my bones.' Her feet don't make a sound against the swamp floor no matter how hard she seems to stomp them, and every once in a while she will point to a branch or under a log and quietly say "dinner alert," or "my spirit senses are tingling," or "would you like fried possum with that?", and highlight another food source that Korra hasn't seen. So far as hunting goes, Toph is probably the most enjoyable partner she's ever had.

When they're back in the ruins and Korra has lit a fire by the fountain, skinned whatever creature she caught and spoked it to roast over the flames, Korra tells the ghost about Lin and Su, and all that they have taught her. She talks about Opal and how quickly she took to airbending, and watches as Toph bares pearlescent teeth in the proudest grin Korra thinks she has ever seen. Then, she talks about herself; growing up in a compound, discovering a different world, being eviscerated by the media. She talks about Amon and equality, Unalaq and how he took Aang from her - along with every other Avatar there ever was. She talks about Zaheer destroying a monarchy and trying to destroy her. She talks about not being a hero, not living up to her predecessor, not being able to bend. When she is done, Toph explains why she came to the swamp.

'They came here before they met me, of course,' she says. 'It's the reason Aang knew I would be his teacher. He saw some spectre of me running between the trees - an aspect of a future he had yet to see. Katara saw her mother. Sokka saw his first girlfriend, and - knowing him - probably cried himself to sleep that night, let's be honest.' Korra runs a hand along the short spear Katara gave her, thinks of the hands that held it before her and manages a smile. 'It was just like them, really, to have this whole life-changing adventure without me. But - I also never really wanted one here. It sounded traumatic. When Sokka told me about this place he swore he would never come back.'

'Because it shows you the things that you've lost?'

'Because he thought that,' Toph shrugs. 'After living here - after _dying_ here - I'm not so sure that's the case.' Korra crosses her legs beneath her and stares across at the spectral girl on the fountain edge. 'When I was younger I had no interest in going to a place that shows you lost things. I had never really _lost_ anything - and what's the point in going to a place of ghostly _images_ when you can't see?'

'So why did you end up here?'

'Seventy years is a long time to change your mind,' Toph tells her. 'My children grew up, and outgrew me. I left the city and my role there behind. I missed travelling. And for perhaps the first time in my life, I started to lose the things that had become most important to me - my friends. When Aang died none of us were shocked - Avatars don't exactly have the highest life expectancy. Sokka followed. And I knew it was only a matter of time before another letter came, from Zuko's children or Katara's. I guess I was afraid of being the only one left - the stone statue left standing when all the others fell. So I left, and dropped back in for my children whenever I was in the area. And eventually I just... found my way here.'

'Like it pulled you,' Korra adds, and Toph nods.

'Yes,' she says. 'I was old, and I knew that if I walked in here I might not walk out. But I was also stubborn. And, loathe as I am to admit it, I was afraid. When I realised what this place was - that old story of a swamp that showed you lost things - I practically _ran_ in.' She frowns. 'Katara, Sokka, and Zuko were my friends - my _best_ friends, and they went through hell with me - but Aang was something else. He took me away from a life I didn't want and gave me a purpose that I never knew I needed. He was larger than life, right from the second I met him. He was my mentor as much as he was my student. We grew up together, forged cities, locked up tyrants. I had never really had a friend before him, and I have never had another one like him since. And while I wasn't shocked at his death, while the world didn't stop spinning and I never put anything on hold, there was a time afterwards where I struggled to see my own role in a world without him. And when I thought that, maybe - even just for a second - I could speak to him again, well - I couldn't give up the chance.'

She pauses for a moment, thinks, sighs.

'I can't tell you how long I was here before I - well, died, obviously,' she continues. 'I wandered in, and kept walking until I found the ruins. As soon as I set foot in the stone courtyard, whatever it was that had called me here fell silent. I was where I was meant to be. I spent a while mapping them out in my head, tunnelling down to explore. There's a whole city down there. I considered rising it out of the ground, but much like the old library out in the desert I think this is better left buried. I'd found, in my time, that when the earth reclaims something from us, it doesn't do so without good reason.' Toph cocks her head as though listening for sound, swipes her palm slowly along the stone beneath her. Korra doesn't know that she can even feel it. 'Eventually, I ran low on supplies. Hunting was difficult for me, considering the environment. I didn't know how long it had been, but I hadn't seen any visions here, hadn't heard any voices. Even the Foggy Water Tribe doesn't come by this way. I considered leaving, sure that I could retrace my steps back the way I'd come.'

'Why didn't you?' Korra asks, and watches the thoughtful frown that crosses Toph's face.

'I was tired,' she says. 'And I found what I was looking for. I was packed and ready to leave, standing in the courtyard and ready to say goodbye to this place and go home. But just for a moment, I felt the weight of a hand on my shoulder. I heard the rhythm of a heartbeat that I had almost forgotten. "It's okay, Sifu," he told me. "You will have another student soon." Then he was gone. Hardly a conversation. But I was... relieved, I guess. Avatar Aang, up to his old tricks; imparting purpose wherever he went.'

Korra feels the words the same way she would a punch to the gut - jarring, painful, and resolutely pushing the air from her lungs. _She_ is that one last student.

'He told you to wait for me,' she says, staring a ghost and feeling her throat tighten and burn. 'You _died_ waiting for me.'

'No, silly girl,' Toph scoffs. 'That's nothing to do with you at all. I didn't die waiting for anyone. I _died_ because it was my time. Have you got any idea how hard it is to get into fights when you're eighty? Everyone tries too hard to be nice to you, respectful, and your bones get too frail to take any real impact anyway. Who wants to live like _that_?' She makes a noise vaguely resembling an "eurghk" and shakes her head. 'I died peacefully in my sleep with the promise of one last pupil before following my friends into the void. There's nothing wrong with that at all.'

Korra wants to believe her, but she is also stubborn. 'I still should have come sooner,' she protests, but Toph waves her off with a wispy hand and chuckles quietly.

'You brickhead,' Toph says. 'There would not have been another day, or another place like this one. Things only ever happen in this world in the precise place and time that they are meant to.' When Korra frowns, Toph smiles. 'I think I understand what I'm supposed to teach you now.'


	3. legacies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Korra falls asleep that night it is to the realisation that she learnt more about being the Avatar in one day of falling off of stone pillars than she ever did in thirteen years of insular teaching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I wasn't like 100% wrong, so there's that.

Korra is told to rest again, and ignore her blue-eyed doppelgänger as it silently paces the perimeter. This time she complies much more quickly.

On the first day, Toph tells her to stand beside the fountain and bend but doesn't specify an element. The ghost evaporates as soon as the direction is given and doesn't return, no matter how loudly Korra throws rocks around or calls her name. Eventually, Korra gives up on calling her back and starts breaking bricks and putting them back together, bending water between her fingers and hoping that pure frustration will bring the the old fire back to her fingertips. It doesn't. She goes through the motions of bending far, far more than she actually bends.

When she thinks the sun starts going down, Korra goes hunting. Toph reappears then, little more than a pearlescent haze following her through the trees - more protection than company.

'This is going to sound incredibly frustrating, but I'm pretty sure the only reason you can't bend is because you don't want to,' she says to Korra, after she has asked for more stories - about lavabending, and Naga, and the metal bending guards-woman who is "uniting" the world. Korra wants to argue, but thinks better of it and bites her lip. 'Do it again tomorrow.'

Korra does. And the day after that. And the day after that, as well. Eventually, out of boredom, Korra takes the meteor rocks from the floor of Toph's resting place and tries to fashion them into bracelets. It's been a long time since she tried to bend metal. It takes her an hour to make it move at all, and another three to shape them into anything half-decent.

One night, Toph takes a more solid shape and perches on her favourite spot at the edge of the fountain, facing Korra where she sits on the bench.

'Earthbending comes easier to you,' Toph notes simply, and Korra stares as a flurry of leaves blows straight through the ghostly body, and shrugs.

'I've always been stubborn,' Korra says. 'My dad used to call me hard-headed. Also brash, reckless, standoffish. I'd get into fights and he would have to drag me home. So earthbending? Wasn't really a shock.'

'Which is your least favourite element to bend?'

Korra thinks about that - about waterbending, which runs in her blood and came first to her, and the way that earthbending just happened naturally, lining up with her young smirk and her heavy feet. She thinks of firebending, and the way it would warm her through snow storms, of airbending and how hard it was to learn, and how freeing it was to finally be able to fly.

'I don't have one.'

Toph tilts her head to the side, seeming to consider the answer. Then she grunts. Korra doesn't know if the sound is good or bad. When she stands in the courtyard the next day Toph stays, watching her forms and occasionally calling corrections.

'Do you think bending is a good thing?' Toph asks her sometime in late morning, and Korra stumbles out of an airbending pose.

'Uh,' she says, eloquent as ever and thinking of Amon - of Asami's father, and his grief. 'I think it depends on the person who uses it.'

'Why?'

'Elements aren't-' she cuts herself off for a moment, thinking over her answer. '-they aren't good or bad, they just _are_. They exist. But they can be used for good things and bad things. Fire can light up the darkness, but it can also burn, and hurt, and cause pain. We breathe air, it gives us life, but it also chaps our lips and rubs our skin raw. We live off of the earth, till fields on it, build houses - but it will quake and take those things away from us as easily as it gives them. Water sustains us, but with too much of it we will drown. If anything, the elements themselves are inherently neutral. It's not what you have, it's how you use it.'

'Sometimes,' Toph tells her, a hint of that proud look on her face. 'Certainly true for any other bender. You though - you _are_ what you wield.'

She doesn't elaborate, but when Korra's schedule changes the next morning she wonders what the test was, and how she passed it. At dawn, Toph tells her to climb one of the crumbling pillars at the other side of the clearing and stand at the topmost point of it. She swears she feels the damned thing tilt when she is halfway up, but Toph tuts at her and points to the top of it, almost two metres from the ground. When she gets there she finds that the rock face, almost eighty centimetres across, has long since eroded from the flat surface it once was. It slopes in all directions, culminating in a single jagged point just off-centre. There is not enough room at the highest point for both of her boots, so she places her feet a little lower, evenly spaced apart. When she straightens up it is only to see Toph standing perfectly straight on the pillar opposite her, leaves rustling in the trees behind her.

'Topmost, I believe I said,' comes the young voice, too many years and too much experience bolstering the authority behind it. She's got to be able to see - Korra is convinced. There is no way that this ghost cannot physically see her.

'It goes to a point,' Korra says.

'Tell me if I look like I care,' Toph drawls.

Korra pushes out a low breath and furrows her brow. She shuffles one foot up to the sharp jut of the rock, lifts her other off the ground to cross it in front of her and presses her palms together over her chest - one of Tenzin's many, many meditative airbending stretches. She hasn't done them in a while, but she used to be able to hold this one for anywhere up to an hour and a half. Across from her, Toph purses her lips but says nothing.

She makes it to ten minutes before the rock jabbing into the sole of her boot starts to bother her, and to fifteen before her knee begins to twinge, but she keeps her balance. Toph stands straight and silent, and Korra wonders if ghosts feel any strain in their legs from standing, or if she is as weightless as the wind that blows through her.

'Can I stop yet?' Korra asks when twenty minutes have passed. 'This rock is digging into my arch and I think my toes are cramping.'

'Oh dear,' Toph deadpans, 'however will you survive the mild discomfort?' Korra purses her lips and glares, but holds the pose until she sees white eyes roll. 'Don't worry - if I were alive I already would have shook the damn thing beneath you or thrown a rock at your head. Airbending forms? Twinkletoes, just like Aang. Spirits, you have more patience than I expected, but what the hell are you going to do with only one foot on the ground?'

Korra grunts at the critique, but lowers her foot back to the pillar and shifts her weight around.

'Are we done?'

'No,' Toph snorts. 'Of course not. Topmost, I said.'

'But not on one foot?'

'No. Not like that.' Korra glances at the empty pillars around her, looking for one with a flat top and spotting the ideal perch two columns away from her. 'Don't even think about it,' Toph cuts in before she can even tense her muscles to move. 'This is the pillar you were given, and there's not a damned thing wrong with it.'

'It's _sharply pointed_ ,' Korra argues.

'Then flatten it.'

The words are so matter of fact that she wonders why she didn't think of it herself. She stares at the rock beneath her feet, hones in on the point, and wonders if she has it in her to earthbend that acutely.

'Well,' she mutters to herself. 'Nothing else to it.' She steadies herself, feet apart, back straight, breathes. Then she follows one of the most basic earthbending forms she knows, stepping forward and forcing the stone to cut and compress beneath her feet. She focusses on the top ten centimetres, but she still feels the shockwave carry all the way down to the column's base. The jagged top separates and slides off, taking the two metre fall to thud on the ground. Success.

For a moment Korra smiles, celebrating the victory, and moves to step onto the "topmost point" - the flat surface she has created. Then the column tilts beneath her feet. She is crucially aware of every slow degree from the first to the tenth, wonders for a moment if the rock will right itself, and realises that it won't when it tips past the fifteenth. That's when she jumps ship. It's a rough landing.

Afterwards, when the dust clears, Korra wipes dirt from her grazed palms and glares at the fractured remains of her column, and Toph laughs atop her own.

'Wow,' Toph calls. 'You really messed that one up.'

'What am I even supposed to be learning here?' Korra asks, bloody and frustrated.

'It wouldn't be all that much of a lesson if I just _told_ you, would it?' the ghost says. 'You're not done yet. Topmost point.'

'It's in broken pieces on the ground, there _is_ no topmost point,' Korra snaps.

'Then build it back up, brickhead.'

Korra glares, and boils inside, exhales furiously and - then she rebuilds the damned column. She stamps her feet into the right position and thrusts her fists forward, pushes through every movement with precision. She knows these movements, she has studied these forms since she was four. Her heart thumps in her ears and she tells herself that she will not mess this up again - not in front of Toph, not in front of Aang's teacher and best friend. And thirty minutes later, sweat soaking through her shirt and muscles aching from the repetition, from being forced into exact, calculated movements, there is a new stone pillar in front of her - all clean lines and flat edges, broken blocks reformed and stacked atop one another. It is wider at the bottom for the sake of stability, and nothing like the others around it. Korra hauls herself to the top of it and jumps twice on the spot to make sure it's sturdy, and then stands on it tiredly and looks at her teacher. Toph tips her head to the side and smiles.

'Well look at that,' she says. 'Balance.'

 

 --

 

She hunts again. This time she goes alone. The Korra clone has parked itself by the pillars and Toph seems sure that it has no plans to move any time soon. Even though she swears her blue-eyed double has crept closer in the last few days, Korra trusts her - because if she can't trust Toph Beifong, lingering ghost or no, she can't trust anyone. Hefting her spear and tracking small animals through the trees, Korra thinks about her "lesson", and wonders what she learnt aside from the fact that old things have a tendency to crumble.

Two years ago, Kya stood with her in the snow and gave voice to her father's words. Korra mumbles them to herself when she makes her kill.

'The Avatar exists to maintain balance,' she says, puzzling over heights and stone columns, shockwaves and the effort of remodelling. 'And to create it in absence.'

She ponders while she tramps through mud and water, climbs over mossy rocks and fallen trees. She is still thinking about it when she returns to the stone courtyard and starts her fire - it takes three less clicks than usual to spark the flame. Toph phases back into existence without so much as a sound after Korra has cooked and finished eating.

'If I may ask,' the ghost starts, and Korra jumps, not expecting the voice, 'what did you think that you would do when you made your way to Republic City?'

Korra hesitates for a moment.

'Be the hero, I suppose,' she replies. 'Like Aang.' Toph takes a seat on the fountain edge again and stares in her direction, but doesn't say anything. Her expression seems unnaturally serious. Korra wets chapped lips and says: 'That's not what the Avatar is, is it? That's what you're meant to teach me.'

Toph seems sad when she nods.

 

\--

 

They talk about history for a long time. Old Avatars - their victories, their mistakes. Kyoshi, who killed a king in a quest for peace and left a dozen other marks on the world because of it. Roku, who blinded himself to his best friend's bad ideas and didn't realise his mistake until it was far too late. They talk about Kurok, who neglected his duties and suffered because of it. They talk about others that Korra hasn't ever known by name, about all the greatest triumphs and the dirty little secrets. And they talk a lot about Aang, and about how Korra doesn't know even half of the details.

'Not everything that twinkletoes did was sunshine and roses, Korra,' Toph tells her. 'People like to say that, of course. "Avatar Aang, who ended the hundred year war. Avatar Aang, who found the peaceful solution." The thing is, people like to forget that there was more to the war than just the ending. A lot of people died. And even when that was over - even when Ozai was locked in a dank cell and powerless - there was always someone else looking to fill the power vacuum. And there was not always a peaceful solution.'

'Aang killed people,' Korra states simply. It is not that the suggestion has not presented itself to her before so much as it is that she took pains to ignore it. Toph nods.

'At times, when there was no other option,' she says. 'When there was no bending to take away, or when it was literally life-or-death. In some cases, where it was a numbers game - one life in return for four hundred, or four thousand, or four hundred-thousand. He's not the first Avatar to do it, and I doubt he'll be the last.'

'How could he go through with it?'

'Not without difficulty. He felt each one keenly,' Toph explains. 'He was built on compassion - you would know more than anyone else. But he was also forced to grow up young, and accept the reality of the world that he lived in. People forget about those parts, because it's much easier to think of the boy who stopped the Fire Lord from razing the earth than it is to acknowledge the political extremists who suffocated silently in their homes before they could needle their way into power. The Avatars you hear about - the ones that are most widely known - have only been defined by their tiniest moments. They are retold as heroes who use their power to save the world or as villains who abuse it. You'll never hear the full story, and that's just the way that history works. But this is not a game of good and evil - nothing about life is that clear cut.'

'I don't know that I could ever kill anyone,' Korra says, contemplating the thought. 'I believe in justice. And I may subvert the law sometimes, I guess, but I think everyone has the right to a fair trial.'

'And what if getting to the trial at all is a danger? What if the trial isn't fair?' Toph asks. 'Have _you_ ever been fairly convicted? Look at the world you live in. When we were younger we all tried to make it better, but in some ways we only made it worse. You said yourself that in one year in Republic City you were manipulated and made into a media sideshow. You live in a time where popularity will dictate judgement. And sometimes that's fine - but what if it's not?'

Korra thinks about Zaheer, all intensity and eloquence, killing the Earth Queen and spurring revolution, a cold blooded killer with big ideas who could talk his way out of anything. She was too weak at the time to take his bending away, and he kind of lost his mind at the end of the fight, but he was formidable enough without elemental control. He's locked up tightly now, but she can only imagine the things she would have to do to stop him if he ever got out, if he ever got to whisper his pretty words to the public.

'But I guess this is more morality than history now,' Toph continues. 'Though they're closely intertwined. Let's talk more about that. You said that your opponents over the years weren't wrong in their ideals, but you crushed them anyway. Why?'

'Because what they were doing was wrong,' Korra says immediately. 'Good intentions do not excuse bad actions.'

'Yet, as a culture, we practically fame the idea of going to war, of fighting for peace,' Toph argues. 'Kill the other guy to save your family, your nation, your rights - kill their children to save yourself. We throw around this idea of "peacekeeping" where we send in men with weapons and training to intimidate or kill people who are trying to intimidate and kill one another - and that looks a lot like occupation, but sometimes I guess we just want a nicer word for it. Shows of force to prevent other shows of force. And it doesn't matter if it comes from a masked man in a warehouse or a democratically elected president standing behind a podium with a dozen microphones aimed at his lips - it is the exact same act, only justified differently. We _constantly_ use good intentions to excuse bad actions, the same way that we use good actions to excuse bad behaviour. "Oh, he was a killer? But he used to attend worship every weekend and help old ladies cross the road". I don't know that I would ever call anyone innately evil, but "severe danger to themselves and others" can sometimes seem to be pretty close. Morality is more than just a spectrum - it's relative.'

'So I'm learning.'

'It bothers you,' Toph notes. 'And it should. Because for the rest of your life you will come across people with great ideas who use them badly. You will meet people who hurt others in the name of equality, of tradition, of freedom, as well as for personal enjoyment or personal gain. For every just cause there will be extremists. Your job is not to be the hero, or to save the day, or to support the popular cause - or, god forbid, reinstate order. It is your job to be neutral - like the elements you wield - to acknowledge the things that need to change and allow them the opportunity, to seek out imbalance of power and correct it. Subdue - and if you can't, eliminate - the outliers. Sometimes you will have to allow bad things to happen as a forum for evolution, sometimes you will have to subvert them before they can. Some of the tiniest acts have the longest reaching effects - so act with the future in mind. This is the world you were given - you can't trade it in for another - and it may be hard to deal with, and it may strain your body and leave you feeling empty and weak, but there is nothing within it that you can not handle.'

'Even bad guys with good intentions?'

'Even good guys with bad ones,' Toph tells her. 'Corrupt politicians and outdated social systems. That Earth Queen was a real piece of work, you know. Just one thing on a long list that Aang shouldn't have left for you.'

'So I'm capable of doing as many bad things as I am good ones. And I should. And all in the name of what-?' Korra chokes on the word, remembering her stone column and the way it shattered when it hit the ground, remembering Kya and feeling it all click into place. 'Oh. Balance.'

'Yes,' Toph sighs. 'That's why Raava chose you. You're not Aang, and you're not Roku, and you're not any other Avatar that there ever was, and you'll do things differently - but that's not a bad thing. Ideas are like architecture - they weather time, an obvious product of the era in which they were constructed, and decades later people "ooh" and "ah" over them as though they're an art form. But eventually they rot, and collapse, and need to be replaced. You're going to do what you think is best, and it won't always be right - but you're human, and you're allowed to make mistakes. And maybe you'll be remembered as a hero, or as the villain, or as the Avatar who "didn't do enough". Hell, you might not even be remembered at all. But that's not what you're here for.'

When Korra falls asleep that night it is to the realisation that she learnt more about being the Avatar in one day of falling off of stone pillars than she ever did in thirteen years of insular teaching.

 

\--

 

In the morning her blue-eyed stalker has moved two metres further into the ruins to stand among the pillars. She can't exactly measure distance, but Korra's sure of it. Toph scoffs and admits nothing, but Korra's pretty sure that whatever power the ghost has is waning. Korra wants to worry about it, but her tutor directs her to put the thought aside and coaches her through some of the finer bits of metalbending that Su and Lin never got to teach her.

'In all honesty,' Toph says conversationally when they break in mid-morning and Korra brews another pot of tea for herself. 'There's not a lot of bending that I can teach you. You already know it, even if you can't quite connect. When I knew I had another student I had kind of hoped that I would be cracking rocks over their head and telling them to keep their feet firm on the ground. It's how I taught Aang.'

'Are you disappointed?'

'Not at all,' the spirit laughs. 'Loathe as I am to say it, I'm teaching you something far more important than earthbending. Though I guess I wonder why Aang thought I would teach you best.'

Korra smiles a little around her tea, and remembers the way that her father used to have to drag her home by the back of her jacket when she got into fist-fights with her next door neighbour, feet planted firmly on the ground the whole way. She's always been self-righteous, always responded better to firm hands that soft words. She thinks of thirteen years in a compound, being told she's not ready, and how familiar that might seem to a blind heiress who wanted to be more than money and polite dinner conversation.

'I think I know,' she says.

 

\--

 

One night, when Korra lies down to sleep, Toph calls to her quietly:

'You can't stay here forever.'

At dawn, her stony, blue-eyed statue has advanced through the pillars.

 

\--

 

They start to talk about the outside world as though it is a definite that she will be returning to it. There's nothing quite like a conversation about current events with a dead lady.

'I'm not sure what to do about Kuvira,' Korra admits, sitting on her bench in the evening and reforming meteor rocks. An old letter comes to mind - a scrap of paper with Opal's name at the bottom. 'Or, "the Great Uniter". Yet another case of good intentions and questionable procedure.'

Toph tuts at her, and the sound seems to echo around the courtyard.

'What's questionable about her actions?'

'What's not?' Korra asks. 'What she's doing sounds a lot like kindness, but if you look closely enough it seems like blackmail. Systematic oppression. Any time one person stands up and declares themselves to be the face of a good cause, you have to question their motivation; does she want to unite the nation for the peoples' benefit, or for her own? Will she step aside when she succeeds and hand power back to the king, or will she keep it for herself?'

' _Should_ she just hand it over?'

'To the Earth King? Probably not,' Korra says. 'Zaheer may have been extreme, but he wasn't wrong. The monarchy is outdated. The old queen thrived by segregating the masses and forcing thousands of people into squalor, and that can't be allowed to happen again. On a base level he initiated change, and I can't fault him that.'

'And is Kuvira not doing the same?' Toph prompts. 'Initiating change?'

'Well, yeah. She is.' Korra bites her lip before continuing: 'I guess I just wonder if it's the kind of change we need. Best case scenario, she unites the nation and anoints herself ruler. Then she decides that unifying the Earth Kingdom is just not enough, and looks across the water. Suddenly we have a far more clinical Fire Lord Ozai on our hands - only this time, instead of preaching about racial superiority, our conqueror likes to talk big about unity and teamwork, and everybody doing their part. War, until someone kills her - probably me.'

'Well, that sounds drastic,' Toph drawls. 'Though I suppose, not outside the realm of possibility.'

'It could be worse. At least Firelord Ozai was liked by a fair majority of the continent he ruled,' Korra says. 'I mean, say Kuvira bullies every single region on the map into following her lead: even if she steps down and hands the reigns to someone else, then what? Instant peace? Crime rates lower, trade routes open. For the next twenty years or so, maybe even for the next century, there is quiet compliance. Everyone does their part - under the threat of losing their protection, of being denied support and supplies if they even so much as voice concern. But underneath it all, as people who live in fear do, they get angry. Tensions brew. Eventually, they revolt. Instant peace does not translate to far-reaching prosperity. An immediate fix does not guarantee longevity.'

'And what if she just ever so simply succeeds?' Toph asks. 'What if she unifies them, and everyone's just... happy?'

Korra shakes her head. 'No,' she says. 'People are never just going to be happy, no matter what you do, as long as you are making decisions for them - depriving them of their autonomy. You and I should know. And that's what she's doing - it's not "unity", it's control. It's force. There is no way it's going to end well for anyone involved. The only question I need to consider, really, is which course of action will have the least negative consequences - not just now, but a hundred years from now.'

'And what are you going to do, Korra? Stop her? Fix the broken parts?'

She thinks of breaking rocks and stacking them back up, replacing all the pipes beneath the kitchen sink of a house in the Fire Nation, learning things she never thought she would need to know.

'Why just fix something when you can replace it with something better?'

Toph pauses, and Korra still doesn't know if the spirit can see, but if she can she is definitely staring. Evaluating, even.

'You know,' Toph says, 'I'm glad that, of all people, you're my last student. And for the record? I think you're gonna be a great Avatar, Korra.'

 

\--

 

Korra wakes at dawn, and knows that her tutelage is coming to an end. The other version of her has breached the courtyard overnight, and now it stands less than three metres away and glares at her, no less angry now than it was when it chased her here.

'As you may have noticed,' Toph calls to her quietly, and Korra drags her eyes away from her mirror image to look instead at the little ghost on the fountain edge, 'it gained ground last night. It gained a _lot_ of ground.'

'You still have things to teach me,' Korra protests quietly.

'Nothing that you can't learn on your own,' Toph says. 'Or from others. You might not be able to talk to Aang in your head anymore or dream his memories, but he's not _gone_. There are family members and friends, teachings and ideas - you're not the only legacy that he left behind. Being the only Avatar isn't the same as being alone. You didn't come here because you needed to learn the finer points of bending - you came because you didn't know what to do with yourself. You didn't know what the Avatar really was. You didn't know what you were without it.'

'I still don't know that. I'm afraid of _being_ the Avatar,' Korra admits. 'It eclipses everything. I don't know what I am without it.'

'Yes you do,' Toph laughs. 'You're Korra. The girl whose father calls her hard-headed and reckless and used to have to drag her around by the scruff of her neck because she wouldn't move her feet off the ground. You're a moral high ground and a bad sense of humour. You're a bender, and you're strong. And if you take any single one of those things away, you still have a hundred others. You are not defined by your abilities or the occasional colour of your eyes, but by your actions - by the memories you make. And the truth is, you will never fully know who you are, because _who you are_ is always changing - but you will learn new things about yourself every day, until the day you die.'

'And how do I stop it from - I don't know, taking me over? How do we co-exist?'

'You don't,' Toph says. 'Kill this notion that you are Korra _or_ the Avatar, Korra _and_ the Avatar. They're not two separate things - you are balance, you are both. It's as much a part of you as bending, as breathing, as snorting when you laugh. The "Avatar" is not an entity, it's a title and a power. Like kings and queens and politicians, it doesn't corrupt you - what matters is whether or not you use it correctly. Remember that, and you'll do fine.'

At the edge of the courtyard, the long-haired, glowing Korra shifts from one foot to the other, clearly agitated. Toph gestures at it.

'You asked me what it was,' she says. 'It's every part of you that you tried to ignore.'

'Why is it here?' Korra asks, turning to gaze at the other version of herself and watching it glare straight back. She's not sure if she's asking about it being in the courtyard, or in the swamp, or in all of physical existence, but Toph seems to decide on one - or all - of them very quickly.

'For the same reason that you and I are,' the pearlescent twelve year old says, and Korra knows it's not just her imagination that the spirit is somewhat less opaque than usual. 'This swamp doesn't show you the things that you've lost, Korra. It shows you the things that you need.' She gets to her feet, and somewhere in the motion the twelve year old turns into a woman in her forties, straight-backed and tall - Lin's mother, the statue in Republic City. Her voice changes, too. 'I would appreciate it if, as a favour to me, you would return my bones to my family, and tell my daughters I loved them. I think, perhaps, I didn't tell them enough.'

'They know,' Korra tells her quietly, and she sees ghostly lips twist into a slight smile. 'But I will. How do I get out of here when you go?'

'Just wait. These things have a habit of sorting themselves out.' Realising the finality of the situation, Korra gets to her feet and faces her spectral teacher. 'I wish that I had lived to know your face by hand, or taught you when you were younger. I feel like we could have been great friends.'

'It was an honour to be taught by you, Sifu Toph,' Korra says gently, smiling. She presses a fist to an open palm infront of her and bows. Toph returns the gesture.

'You were an honour to teach, Avatar Korra.'

 

\--

 

When Toph is gone, Korra feels it. Her mirror doesn't immediately start moving towards her but Korra knows that it can. There is nothing left in the ruins but the Avatar, and Korra, and bones.

She turns to face herself and, just like days before, the Avatar grabs at her wrists with scalding hands. Korra feels it less this time. Instead of jerking away and running for the hills, she takes in the furrowed brow and the senseless anger and remembers when she was eighteen and it consumed her.

'You're lonely,' she says. 'You're one person, and you used to be hundreds. I didn't want you to only be me. I'm sorry.'

It doesn't let her go, but it doesn't try to crush her wrists into a fine powder, so - progress, really. She pushes forwards gently, slides her arms through steel fingers and over concrete shoulders. For the first time, instead of running away from those glowing eyes and the tightly-coiled body, she embraces it. It's hands drop to it's sides, clueless, no idea what to do with them if it isn't fighting. That's okay.

'I understand. We can go home now.'

Korra is eclipsed by blue light. When it fades, there is nothing left in the ruins but Avatar Korra and bones.

 

\--

 

The breeze changes direction, and it brings Jinora with it. Korra sees the girl drop through the canopy, watches her glide through the pillars and scan the ground, pull up on the current and come to a perfect landing when she finally spots Korra.

'Knew it,' the young airbender proudly announces. 'Flash of garish blue light on the horizon? Had to be you.'

'I never do anything in halves,' Korra replies with a smile. 'Is it just you and your glider?'

'No,' Jinora says. 'Everyone's been out looking for you. Dad will be along shortly. He's gonna be mad.'

'Wouldn't be the first time.' She sighs, and offer Jinora some tea. 'If you want to wait for him, I have a couple of things I need to get together inside.'

She has already rolled Toph's remains into the old bedroll and tied it as securely as she can with vines, and she brings the deceptively small bundle out of the old hut and leaves it by the fire. She wishes she had something more respectful to hold the old bones, but then she _is_ in a swamp.

She takes the old knapsack on the floor and fills it with the meteor rocks, Katara's flask of spirit water, and the old, almost empty tin of tea leaves. And then she brings the armour out, piece by piece, because leaving it in an old building in the middle of the swamp never to be seen again is not befitting of her master's garb, and she knows someone who would look after it far better. When she's done she takes her seat on the bench by the campfire and talks to Jinora about all that she's seen. She gets as far as Ember Island before Tenzin comes crashing through the trees with Oogi.

'Well, you're not dead,' he says to her when he dismounts, 'so now I can kill you myself.'

He is furious, but she's glad to see him. She ignores his frown, and his disapproving, angry eyes, and the lecture that he clearly wants to give her, and wraps her arms tightly around his waist. The Avatar disappeared in a blinding light when she held it, but Tenzin just relaxes and hugs her tightly back, whispering that he's so, so glad to see her and that everything will be okay.

Afterwards, when Tenzin and Jinora have helped her to move her small collection of dusty things onto Oogi's saddle, Korra stands at the doorway of Toph's abandoned crypt and takes the faded cloth headband down from the nail above the door. She wraps it around her wrist, and as she ties it she whispers a thank you. She still can't bend the way she wants to, she still has a whole world to pull apart and put back together, but that's okay. She breathes far easier leaving the swamp than she did walking in. When Oogi takes to the sky and the three of them leave, she almost swears she hears a whisper of "you're welcome" in return - but maybe that's just the rustling of the leaves.

 

\--

 

In the air, on the way home, Korra talks about travelling, about running away. She doesn't talk about the swamp in any way other than to figure out how long she was in it (three weeks, maybe more). Tenzin asks if she found what she was looking for. She touches the cloth at her wrist and the spear lying across her knees, and when she looks at his face she remembers the first time they met, when she thought he was someone else. Legacies, every one of them.

'Yeah,' she says. 'I think I did.'


End file.
